Report from Amazon re:Invent, Day One

Some random thoughts from Amazon’s second Cloud conference, re:Invent, in Las Vegas.

There are 9,000 attendees here, easily making it one of the largest Cloud conferences ever. But the crowd is about 98% male. Where are the women of the Cloud?

Amazon is rolling out WorkSpaces, their new Cloud-based desktop virtualization service. It will clearly shake up the desktop virtualization marketplace, but it’s unlikely to expand the market by much. While admins love desktop virtualization, users hate it, because a blip in the network connection can hose your entire desktop experience.

The key to successful DevOps is beer. DevOps requires technological, process, and cultural changes, with the latter being the most difficult. Work through the cultural changes by helping developers and ops people get to know and like each other. That’s where beer comes in.

IBM is going after Amazon, but Amazon isn’t worried. After all, Amazon’s cloud both works and makes them money. At the same time. Imagine that!

Workload migration and Cloudbursting have largely been vaporware up to this point, because workloads are typically complex and distributed, thus difficult to migrate. But no longer – CliQr has cracked this nut in spectacular fashion.

Amazon has a hard time opening the kimono. The press weren’t invited to the analyst briefings, and neither press nor analysts were invited to the enterprise summit.

I’m going to miss the Pub Crawl tonight. My wife joined me on this trip, so I’d rather have a quiet evening with her. That means my evening will be only 50% male, while the pub crawl is bound to be in the 98% vicinity. Have fun, guys!

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